


Never Have I Ever

by anamatics



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/F, M/M, it all begins with a game of never have I ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-25
Updated: 2014-03-25
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:56:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1364818
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anamatics/pseuds/anamatics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Joan Watson is thirty-three, she has an experience that fundamentally alters everything she has ever held to be true about herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Never Have I Ever

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Я никогда в жизни...](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2538905) by [k8Cathy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/k8Cathy/pseuds/k8Cathy)



When Joan Watson is thirty-three, she has an experience that fundamentally alters everything she has ever held to be true about herself.  She’s a year out of residency, a rising star in the department, and she cannot remember a time in the past decade when she’s stopped for a moment to catch her breath. 

It’s the middle of the day on a Thursday and she’s not at work.  She feels almost guilty, out amongst the bustle of the city, but her patient isn’t prepped for his scheduled surgery and they’re monitoring him for a potential infection. She has no reason to be in her office, her paperwork is all caught up, so she’s not.  She’s standing in front of a painting with no proper name, trying to make sense of it.  Of all the strangeness and charm in the museum, this is the painting she always comes back to.

She thinks she likes the chaos of it.

-

"Never have I ever… slept with someone of the same gender as me…"

"Sherlock!" Joan sounds scandalized, but she lowers one finger in a resigned sort of way and watches as Sherlock’s eyebrows climb up his forehead and Marcus lets out a healthy guffaw of laughter.  He, too, has lowered a finger. 

They’re on a stake out, trying to stay awake on bad coffee and better conversation.  Usually they quiz each other on trivia, but Marcus had gone to see some of his younger cousins over the weekend and they’d taught him the game.  Joan’s got to admit, she hasn’t played it since she was probably eleven or twelve, and it’s proven a lot more fun than Sherlock droning on and on (and on) about cigarette ash or bees.

"You go first," Joan says to Marcus.  They’re not looking at each other, eyes trained on the warehouse where their suspect might turn up.  Joan doesn’t think she can look at Sherlock, because he’ll demand details, and Joan doesn’t really want to share them.

Marcus leans forward from the back seat, elbows on his knees.  “Well,” he begins, like this is the start of a great story.  “I had this buddy in high school…”

-

"It’s lovely, isn’t it?" 

Joan turns, the collar of her coat catching on her hair. She raises a hand to brush it out of her eyes and tucks it behind her ear.  She has a fellow admirer of this painting, a woman younger than herself who is staring at her with interest. 

"I suppose so," Joan says, because she honestly cannot say how this painting makes her feel.  It’s a deep, visceral sort of a feeling, an embrace of a set of colors that she knows she should appreciate culturally, but does not.  They’re too loud, too much for her, even in the muted sense of oils on linen and a work that’s too fragile to ever move now.  She wonders if that was maybe the point of the painting in the first place, to draw out her confusion about everything she cannot understand and lay it bare before her.

"Bacon always said that this was his most unconscious work," the newcomer adds.  She’s got her arms wrapped around herself, an oversized purse slung over one shoulder and a long wool overcoat that dances just above her knees.  She looks, Joan concludes, like old money; but her accent says she isn’t local. English, by the sound of her. "I could spend hours trying to discern its meaning."

Joan feels herself let out a quiet chuckle.  “I have spent hours,’ she says, shaking her head.  “I’m no closer to understanding it.”

-

"So you just went along with it," Joan asks.  There are tears prickling at the corners of her eyes, she’s laughing so hard.  "I mean, really Marcus, just because he wasn’t sure and you were?"

Marcus holds up his hands in a timeless gesture of surrender.  “The way I see it, you gotta try something once before you dismiss it out of hand.”  He shakes his head.  “And Andre had already done so many of the stupid drug things, so I guess it was my job to do the other high-risk behaviors.  My momma just about whooped my ass when she found out.”

"Because she was homophobic?"  Sherlock asks, eyes trained straight forward on the warehouse in front of them.  Joan wonders why he’s not looking at Marcus.  The warehouse has been quiet for hours now.  They’re just killing time.

"Nah, she was just afraid I’d get AIDS or something."  Marcus shakes his head.  "I got her concern at the time, and I told her that I wasn’t really into it - but at least I can say I’ve tried it."

"How very… progressive of you," Sherlock says and turns to Joan.  "A Sapphic dalliance in college, I’m guessing?"

Joan looks down at the floor of the car, littered with paper she’s shredded and empty coffee cups.  Saying it was in college would make it so much easier.  “It wasn’t a dalliance,” she begins, glancing over at Sherlock.  “It was an  _experience_ , and I was thirty-three.”

She pretends she doesn’t notice the way that Sherlock’s eyes narrow when she says the words.  “Her name was Jamie, and she was English.”

-

"You’re a doctor," the woman says.  Joan’s used to it, her beeper is strapped to her purse strap, pressing into her chest through her coat.  It isn’t that she wants to advertise it, but she has to be able to hear it.

She nods once, and turns her eyes away from the painting to look at her new companion.  There’s a fullness to her cheeks that suggests she’s far younger than she looks.  Joan is struck then, by a strange realization. “You’ve just had a baby,” she replies.  She doesn’t make a move to look for the child - this isn’t the sort of painting she’d ever expose a child to - and because it isn’t her place to ask.

Sharp, ruthlessly intelligent blue eyes narrow, and Joan’s almost alarmed at the reaction.  At first it’s confusion, followed by anger, a downward pull of lips and a furrowing of eyebrows.  She’s shocked this woman, with her pronouncement, and it’s evident in every fiber of the way she’s carrying herself.

Joan wants to put up her hands, to tell her that she meant no offense by it.  “How could you tell?”  she demands, raising a hand to brush a strand of blonde hair from her eyes.

Joan inclines her head to viewing bench and tugs her purse strap over her head.  The beeper is silent, and it seems she’s going to have a night free as well, the way things are progressing.  She sits on the bench and explains how she can tell, pointing out the signs she saw, and how probably most normal people wouldn’t be able to.

"I’m Joan, by the way," she says, holding out her hand some ten minutes later.

"Jamie," comes the response.

-

"How do you deduce that a woman’s had a kid?"  Marcus asks, and Joan turns to look at him over her shoulder.  He’s got the binoculars now, staring down the night watchman as he makes his rounds around the warehouse.  His eyes are almost comically magnified behind the lenses.  "I mean, aside from the obvious baby."

Joan looks away.  “I think it was how sad she seemed.”

"Did she lose it?"  Sherlock is staring at her intently, and Joan feels uncomfortably under the intensity of his gaze.

“I don’t know,” she confesses.  “I didn’t ask.”

-

"This is my favorite painting here," Joan says.  They’ve circled around the floor.  Jamie has an opinion about almost every piece of art they’ve seen - and her voice fills Joan’s head up with pictures of the times of the painters, the skill behind their craft, and the power of the images themselves.  They’re back before Francis Bacon’s painting with no formal name, and Joan’s drawn again by the chaos.  She can’t look away.

There’s so much going on, the anonymous way that the umbrella falls over the man with the boutonniere’s face, half-obscuring the picture, the knowledge of what is painted underneath. The ideas and the chaos of it that bombard her mind staccato as she tries to take it all in and fit it into her linear way of thinking.  There’s no comprehending it - and Joan loves it.  So much of what she does now is known to her.  She’s on top of her game, a rising star in her field - but this is the one of the few things in her life that she still finds baffling.

Another baffling thing happens, there in the middle of MoMa on a Thursday afternoon as a gaggle of Japanese tourists move into the room.  Jamie leans over and kisses her and it’s like a revelation.

"I have a room near here," Jamie whispers into her ear.

-

"Shit, I think he’s here."  She’s got the binoculars now, and the grey Subaru that they’ve been looking for, almost black in the dark of the night, has pulled up to the unit.  Joan pulls the binoculars from her eyes and passes them back to Marcus.  He’s leaning forward again, and his hands are poised on his radio. 

"We have to wait," Sherlock says.  He’s been uncharacteristically quiet this entire time, lost in thought.  "To ensure that he goes into the storage unit and procures his murder bag before we apprehend him."

They sit back, Marcus letting the binoculars rest on his knee, and wait.

-

The room is in a hotel that Joan knows by reputation and by name, it dates back to the Twenties and it further drives home Joan’s theory that Jamie comes from old money.  Leaning in a corner by the window is an easel, a sheet thrown haphazardly onto the floor beneath it, there’s a chair pulled up to it, and a mess of paints on the newspaper covered table beside it.

"I should have known you were an artist," Joan jokes, shrugging off her coat.  She unclips the beeper from her purse and sets it on the table beside the paints.  There’s a jar of brushes but the canvas is covered.  Joan has never been one to pry, so she drapes her coat over the back of another chair and sets her purse down beside it.  "You really know your stuff.”

Jamie’s smile is serene.  “What is the likelihood that’s going to go off?” she asks, stepping far too close to Joan and letting hesitant fingers drift across Joan’s hip.

“Not very,” Joan confesses, and Jamie’s fiddling with the buttons of her shirt, undoing them with meticulous fingers from the bottom up.  “My patient has an infection…” she trails off, as those lips are on her again.  Joan can’t remember a time when she’s done this, a time when she’s simply not  _cared_  and something has happened.  She’s usually rigid in how she conducts her life; she hadn’t thought she’d be able to relax enough to let something like this develop organically.

“Good,” Jamie says, and her fingers slip up and underneath Joan’s bra.  They’re a little cold, but Joan doesn’t mind.  It’s the sensation that she’s interested in, the feeling of release and of wet heat pooling at the pit of her stomach. 

Jamie is an artist, and the images she paints with rough words whispered in Joan’s ear as her fingers divest Joan of all her clothing are enough to make Joan want blindly and without regard to what this could mean – what this could do to her.  It could ruin her.

And Jamie does ruin her, pressing her back into the bed, her body curling over Joan’s and her lips pressing messy kisses against Joan’s neck.  She still sucks, still lingers and probably lingers and wants to leave marks like a teenager.  Joan tears her eyes away from the great storm that’s caught up in Jamie’s eyes and tugs the blouse she’s wearing up over her head.  On her stomach there are marks, but they’ve started to fade.  Joan doesn’t touch them; she pretends to not notice them, distracted by a bra strap that won’t come undone.

Joan gets her hands into Jamie’s pants, the wool blend rubbing against her wrist, irritating an allergy Joan likes to pretend she doesn’t have.  She rolls them over, naked save her underwear, and tugs off Jamie’s pants. 

It seems funny, later, that Jamie’s underwear are boring.  Then again, so are Joan’s.  Jamie looks down at her plain black underwear and shrugs, propped up on her elbows so she can continue to work on the mark Joan is sure Jamie is leaving on her shoulder.  “No one plans it,” Jamie says into Joan’s ear, and it’s then that Joan realizes that this is truly a whim born of a mutual admiration of the same confusing painting. 

They’re rough with each other, and Joan finds that getting a woman off is much the same as a man, only that she likes it more.  She likes how easy Jamie makes little noises of reverence, her breath caught in her throat as her fingers knot in Joan’s hair.  It is reverence too, Joan realizes, because she’s gasping out things that are too much, too passionate, for such an encounter.  She ignores them, thighs against her ears and set on a task she’s never actually considered doing before.  She wants this and she’ll give as good as she gets.  Her lips curl into a smile and she rocks her whole body forward, knowing, and yet not knowing, when, exactly it will be enough.

She comes undone in a twitch of hips and a low cry that makes the desperate want that’s fueling Joan’s every motion bubble forth into something that feels like desperation.  Joan is satisfied, her chin sticky and her expression smug as she looks up, head resting against the still trembling thigh that’s wrapped over her shoulder.

Jamie’s tugging her up, hips canting forwards, catching against Joan’s.  It’s a slow, lazy kiss, and Jamie’s fingers are pressed against her, rubbing, dancing, slipping inside.  Joan rocks against her, and  _god—_ if isn’t exactly what she needed Joan doesn’t know what is.

She doesn’t know how long it lasts, afterwards.  She remembers the sensations far more than the act itself.  She’d never slept with a woman before, and she hasn’t since.  It had been an  _experience_ , and it had ruined her.

-

"I find it really hard to believe that you’ve never had a same-sex experience, Sherlock," Joan says later, when they’re leading their suspect away in cuffs.  He’s always been so free with his associations regarding sex, and Joan’s never particularly thought of him as particularly opposed to the idea of sex with a guy.  He hates the intimacy of relationships, and Joan knows he’s been burned once – Irene, the woman he never speaks of, the one who died.

"Oh," he says, frowning.  "I have."  He smiles widely at her, eyebrows wiggling suggestively as they tend to do when he’s saying something overtly sexual.  "My question was about same-gender experiences."

Joan rolls her eyes.  “That’s splitting hairs, Sherlock.”

"Not really," He says and Joan knows that he is right – she gets the difference.  "She was a wonderful woman, and she and I suited each other’s needs perfectly."

-

Jamie is gone in the night, and Joan’s pager is silent on the bedside table.

All that lingers is a piece of thick, still-damp watercolor paper, a crude, impressionistic rendering of the painting that they’d both admired sketched out upon it.  The colors are blotchy, and Joan stares at it for a long time, one hand holding her hair off her forehead as she tries to blink the sleep from her dirty, smudged contacts. 

It is beautiful, in its own way. 

(She has it framed and hangs it in her office until the day that she finds she can no longer stand with a life in her hands.  That day she takes it down and packs it away in storage.)

-

After they’ve given statements to the police regarding the arrest that’s been made, Joan begs off the ride home Marcus offers both of them and goes to her storage unit.  Under bright fluorescent lights that make her eyes sting, she digs through boxes until she finds the painting, and she brings it home wrapped up in brown paper and tied up with string. 

She hangs it in her bedroom as Sherlock stares up at his Moriarty wall, Napoleon Bonaparte and all.  He’s looking for Waterloo, and Joan’s taking in Francis Bacon – albeit a crude likeness – for the first time in years.  She’s still struck by the chaos of it all, even in this reproduction in a different medium. 

This is the first time she’s thought of that encounter in  _years_.

-

When they do find Moriarty, it isn’t what Joan wants or expects, and she keeps her face perfectly blank and lets him have his grief when it is her world that’s being destroyed slowly from the inside.  She’s stuck playing hostess to one of the greatest actresses she’s ever encountered, too caught up in trying to figure out what this all means at the same time as trying to keep herself out of the way.

“I wouldn’t have thought you the sentimental type,” Irene’s voice, American and all wrong, comes through the door one evening. 

“I don’t know what sort of game you’re playing at,” Joan says, and her voice sounds almost bitter.  “But you should stop, while you still can.”  She turns away from the painting on the wall and stares hard at this shell of a woman.  “He’s going to figure you out.”

Irene’s fingers curl around the doorframe and she leans forward into the room, a wicked smile playing at her lips.  “That, my dear Joan,” she says, and her voice’s is back how Joan remembers it, full of warmth and life and everything Joan’s tried to force herself to forget.  “Is the point of this charade.”

-

Joan tells Sherlock after the fact, and he’s angry and mopey for hours before Joan gets it out of him that Moriarty had told him that  _she_  had Joan first. 

“I don’t want to sleep with you,” she jokes, checking on his shoulder and tutting at how it’s not healing as nicely as she’d like.  “So I don’t know where she’s getting  _that_  idea.”

“She sees that we are better together, Watson,” Sherlock explains, hissing as she helps him back into his undershirt.  He’s still in pain, but he won’t take so much as an Advil to help with the pain.  Joan admires his dedication and is secretly pleased that he’s not using this as an excuse to fall off the wagon.  “And she doesn’t like it.”

There’s so much that he  _isn’t_  saying about this, and that is what gets to Joan in the end. He wants to say more, but it truly had been a one time thing.  Joan doesn’t ever think, knowing what she does now, that it could ever happen again.

They stare at each other for a long time, and slowly Joan starts to formulate a plan. It’s perfect, it will be unexpected, and that’s what they need, to truly shock Moriarty.  It’s the only way to get the upper hand.

Moriarty falls for it, like Joan knew she would.  And as Captain Gregson leads her away, Joan cannot help but smile broadly at her, vindicated in victory.

“Never again,” Jamie swears, stepping away from her escort and leaning in close enough to whisper in Joan’s ear. Her voice isn’t angry though, it’s as reverent as it was the first time they’d been this close to each other.  “I underestimated you, Joan Watson.”  She glances down at her hands, cuffed as they are.  “Perhaps next time we can find a better use for these?”

And Joan hates the swell of want that wells up at the pit of her stomach just thinking about the last time.  She turns away, her expression as blank as she can make it.  “Maybe,” she says.

That night, Joan goes home and stares up at the chaos of  _Painting (1946)_ and finds that it makes more sense to her than ever before. 

**Author's Note:**

> (an: [painting referenced](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/44/Painting_1946.jpg) \- oddly inspired by that post floating around re: Joan and Moriarty having some sort of one night stand back when Joan was a surgeon and Jamie is still getting established in the underworld.)


End file.
